Emptiness

Maybe it's a contrast thing. Such that winter brings snow, starkly white, standing against a darkened background for lack of sun, and so does love stand out when present and evoke the darkness when gone from. I've accepted my compulsion toward companionship.

It's supposed to be a solitary exercise, this life. Understanding and the path to enlightenment are meant to be a la solo, but I can't help this desire for another person. Just one. And I believe it lies in reflections.

We and I have no identity myself. I look to others to reflect back to me who I am in reactions, validation, comparison. I am empty and everyone does this, therefore everyone is empty, therefore there is nothing to reflect back to me, yet it does. Life is contradiction.

I am looking for an emptiness to equal my own, or as I have often thought to myself, matching damages.

And the winter is empty. Snow falls on stillness. The branches do not shake, the cars do not run and coldness seems to impair the body, the mind, the heart, but for one thought. Love.

Before all this deep thinking, it started on a winter night when I was sixteen, feelings for a woman, a snowman built on a trunk and playfulness sliding in the parking lot of the fast food restaurant where we worked. She was, arguably, my first love, and compacted upon my mind all those romantic feelings in that one wonderful season.

And without love I am by comparison empty, as I am, searching for emptiness in another, to be empty together.